Grant: CIHR Fellowship

Early evidence suggests that injury and concussion rates are high in youth female sport compared to male. Given long term consequences of injury and concussion, injury prevention strategies need to be considered to minimize risk and reduce health care costs. A potential solution is a neuromuscular training (NMT) warm-up. NMT warm-ups have been found to reduce injury in youth sport by 30-80% and early evidence suggests, when completed three or more times per week, they can reduce concussion by 59%. The proposed PhD project recruits through a larger multi-year study, "Sport Injury Prevention in Scottish Schools (SIPSS): Protecting children against short and long-term effects of sport-related injury". During the 2024-2025 and 2025-2026 high school academic years, female team sports (i.e., rugby, soccer, field hockey) will be recruited. Once recruited, teams will be assigned to the intervention or control group. The intervention group will receive the Sport Injury Prevention in Scottish Schools (SIPSS) NMT warm-up, which consists of a 10-15-minutes warm-up of aerobic, balance, strength, agility, and head/neck control and endurance exercises in collaboration with the Sport Injury Prevention Research Centre (UCalgary) for co-design to modify for the Scottish school context. The control group will receive a "standard of practice" warm-up. All coaches will be invited to a workshop to learn the NMT or control warm-ups prior to the academic year. Throughout the playing season, warm-up use for both NMT and control warm-ups will be tracked and individual participant session attendance will be documented. All injuries will be recorded by school nurses or physiotherapists and further injury event details will be captured. Injury and concussion rates will be compared between the teams using the NMT warm-up and the teams using the "standard of practice" warm-up to evaluate the effectiveness of the warm-up program in Scottish high school female sport.